Visualization and Aesthetics Research

There is a quick summary of three nice papers at Visualization and Aesthetics Research. This brought to me via Google Alerts.

Polite error messages

So while I'm trying to access one of my Google docs, this is what I get. That's such nice phrasing!

Google Web Toolkit (GWT)

While I'm backing up my laptop's hard drive, in preparation for reformatting the bloody thing due to a problem with an "invalid node structure", I thought I'd write up some notes on my foray into GWT.

I was intrigued by the idea of using Java to generate maintainable JavaScript. I'm convinced that the level of interactivity that AJAX affords is totally adequate for much of what I want to do. I'm really not a big fan of JavaScript, though.

So I downloaded the GWT and looked through the samples. I found Chapter 10 of the GWT book from Manning really quite helpful in guiding me through setting up an RPC.

I had some trouble setting up Eclipse to export the war file for deployment on Tomcat. Apparently many other people have too. In the end, I used some ideas from Chad Bourke (via the GWT Developer Forum but wound up doing something like

cd Semantics2
./Semantics2-compile
ant -f semantics2.ant.xml package
cp semantics2.jar www/org.ikit.Semantics2/WEB-INF/lib/
cd www/org.ikit.server
zip -r ../../Semantics2.war .
scp ../../Semantics2.war remote.server:/path/to/tomcat/webapps

In all, it seems that it's quite possible to extend Knowledge Forum by setting up an RPC service that talks to the ZTB API and then serializes the necessary bits to send across the wire to the client. It seems reasonably fast, too.

About this blog

Odd, really, to have my "about" message be the second entry in my blog. I guess the previous entry was just a test post to see how blogger works. So what's this blog about? It's about my life as it unfolds, right now. Which means there are multiple threads: work (as in the stuff I'm paid to do, but which has a tendency to spill over into other parts of my life), home (being a dad, spouse, and friend), school (a unfortunate term for my doctoral work), and cycling (a recently re-found passion). I envy people who can neatly compartmentalize their lives into separate worlds. I have no such skill, and so things messily cross over from one realm to another. Anyway, this is the story of my life.